AzureDevops

 A former co-worker reached out a few weeks ago and was looking for advice to give to his son who was about to Graduate and looking to break into the DevOps field. Here is the advise I gave, specifically around the Chicago market: A few years ago I read "The Phoenix Project" and that really got me to focus on changing my career trajectory. I think it's a great explanation of some of the fundamentals of the DevOps philosophy without being too dry. I can't recommend it enough. Skills wise - automation is going to the be the key thing to focus on and it's not going away anytime soon. Tools like Ansible & Terraform are really great to spend time with. Depending on what his dream job is, I would look up and start to focus on the skills required to get there. For example, if he's interested in working for Google, he'd probably want to put some time in to learn Golang, Kubernetes, etc. I think the most important thing is to network, if he plans on staying in

 I wanted to answer what the "Azure Devops" Microsoft suite is as many people may not understand the powerful tool that it is and as a former consultant I see a lot of people have a ton of disparate tools when Microsoft makes it easy.  So - here are 5 reasons to use Azure Devops. 1) Replace JIRA Azure Boards can replace your backlog in JIRA. If you run an agile team, you probably use Jira - however you can easily use Azure Boards and replace your JIRA backlog. The benefits are that you are buying into the Azure DevOps suite and have one tool to manage your code and backlog. JIRA can be expensive, so it makes sense to start a new project with Azure Boards - no need to default to JIRA. 2) Replace Bitbucket, Gitlab, TFS, etc. Azure Repos enables users to write to private cloud hosted repos. This way you can not only take advantage of having a Microsoft hosted and private repo, but you can easily integrate with the other tools in the Azure Devops suite like Test Plans & Pipel